Читать книгу Chili Dawgs Always Bark at Night - Lewis Grizzard - Страница 13

Let’s Get the Trains on Track

I’ve heard enough about airlines taking care of their planes so that they break in half on landing or the top rips off in flight.

I don’t want to know anymore about how many near-miss midair collisions there are and about how we don’t have enough air-traffic controllers.

And I don’t want to hear anything else about unhappy airline employees. Deliver me from the guy who’s mad at his boss and is in charge of making certain all the bolts are tight for the flight to Omaha.

I’ve been saying this for years and nobody will listen to me, but maybe now, with all the frightening things that are going on in the airline industry, somebody will.

Bring back the train!

All we’ve got now in this country as a passenger rail system is the government-subsidized Amtrak that is far behind the systems of other countries. So much so, it is an embarrassment.

The French and the Germans and the Japanese know something about passenger trains. They run them at speeds over two hundred miles per hour and very few of them ever get hijacked, rerouted during bad weather, or canceled because there’s nobody to drive them.

We need an alternative to air travel. Driving is unsafe and tiresome, and if you want to ride the bus, you’ll get a seat next to some guy with a bad cough and there’s nowhere to go to get away from him.

But a train. If the French can build one that runs smoothly at two hundred miles an hour, certainly we can.

Let’s say you are traveling from Chicago to Atlanta. That’s about seven hundred miles.

To fly, you have to get to O’Hare from the Loop, which is a pain and costs you. You leave at 4:00 PM for a 5:30 flight.

Your plane backs out of the gate at 5:45 and doesn’t actually take off until 6:15. The flight is just over an hour, but due to heavy traffic at Atlanta’s Hartsfield, you have to hold for twenty minutes.

You finally touch down in Atlanta three hours and change after you left for O’Hare.

But then you’ve got to ride the shuttle to the main terminal and wait on your bags. After that, it’s a cab ride into town. You get to your hotel after what has at least been a four-hour ordeal.

But the two hundred-mile-an-hour train from Chicago to Atlanta:

It leaves Union Station, a short cab ride from the Loop, where you work. Zoom, off you go. It’s smooth. It’s relaxing. There’s a guy next to you coughing, so you go to the club car for a drink.

There’s a few quick stops, like the old days when the train stopped at every crossing. Maybe there’s ten minutes in Louisville. And another in Nashville. And Chattanooga.

You arrive in Atlanta’s downtown station, let’s say in five hours.

It’s about the same as the flight, only think of the hassle you’ve avoided and the money you’ve saved in ground transportation.

Putting a modern, efficient passenger system to work in this country would probably cost trillions, I admit.

So let’s make peace with the Russians and then use all the money we’re spending on missiles to bring back the trains.

What a great idea, and I know how to get the president to agree.

Take Air Force One away from him and put him out there in the crowded, unfriendly skies with the rest of us.